Introduction

Welcome to my blog – nice to see you here. :) I am really excited that it is finally March and “Daj się poznać” contest has just begun!

Today I will talk about my master thesis project – my motivation, technologies involved and the general concept. To be honest – the concept is still evolving and I am not even sure whether it makes any sense – but does master thesis project have to make sense? ;)

Motivation

My original master thesis topic was connected with machine learning and expert systems – I was supposed to create some system that would analyze medical data in cooperation with some doctors from the Warsaw Children Hospital. I was really excited that I could help them with my programming skills but in the end the doctor I had to cooperate with didn’t know what she would want from me. My tutor suggested that I could do something with his current favorite topic – temporal logic. Since I always try to stick game development in every academic project, I decided to create some sort of history creation system for RPG games based on this logic.

Reality

I started thinking about this idea and I realized one thing – no one would ever be able to describe any complicated, multi-threaded story using logical equations. It would take too long and would not be convenient. Since the topic proposed by my tutor is “On a computer game implementation based on an extended logic” I came up with another idea of a potentially useful tool – system that allows to model interactions between objects in the game world – NPCs (Non Playable Characters). It should be easier to define such relations since we could focus on only one object at a time. Then we could run some simulations and see how these objects influence each other and check for some inconsistencies.

Why temporal logic?

That is the topic of the next post. ;)

Technologies

My perfect effect that I dream of is the Unity plugin together with some GUI tool for defining rules – I will try to create this tool also as a Unity plugin, so that the whole system could be used in real game projects. Why Unity? I have some kind of experience with that engine and I am quite fond of it – at least for now, since no last updates have crashed for about a month. ;d I also use it at work and I would like to deepen my knowledge about it. Temporal logic system (calculations on the rules) is not part of my thesis – I am lucky to have met PhD student who is working on its implementation in Scala. So my first task is to make it possible to call his Scala methods from my C# script in Unity…

About the blog

I set up this blog on Azure using my Dreamspark subscription (gotta use that last semester of my studies! ). I can’t figure out how to use my custom domain properly, so now it is made using simple HEADER redirection. I may be wrong, but I guess I cannot do this properly (to have my domain as port of all subpages urls) using this free account. Any help on that matter would be great.

I am also struggling with the decision about the blog language. I chose English, but now I feel that my writing style in English is not really entertaining… Perhaps I will try to write the next post in Polish and see how this comes out.

Thanks for stopping by and check out the rest of contest bloggers here – there are over 200 participants! This is so great! <3
My next post will be more concrete, I promise. :)